[jamal-kumar]

The best part is all SLS does is contribute to the foaming of the toothpaste, that's literally all it does (Same thing in soap). It's just to give some psychological idea that foamy toothpaste cleans better. Something like a focus group in the 1950s came up with this ingredient.

[kragen]

no

it's a surfactant

surfactants emulsify lipids in polar liquids like water

such emulsification is crucial to many kinds of cleaning

because cell membranes are lipid bilayers surfactants also can cause cytolysis, maybe relevant if you're trying to get bacterial films off your teeth, and sds is commonly used for this in bio labs

surfactants also often foam but this is irrelevant

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_dodecyl_sulfate

[jamal-kumar]

I could imagine there's better surfactants than that out there, you sound correct and now i feel my dentist is full of lies

[kragen]

research papers in biomedical fields often drip with disdain for 'practitioners' (doctors, dentists, nurses, etc.) because their knowledge of chemistry, epidemiology, genomics, etc., is so limited and often wrong

i'd like to see one of those statisticians save an abscessed motherfucking molar though

anyway your dentist is probably not actually being bribed by tom's of maine, he just knows a lot of his patients had less canker sores when they stopped using toothpaste with dish detergent in it

because guess what else has cell membranes